Beth Rugan Shepard is the Instruction Coordinator Librarian/Arts & Humanities Librarian at the University of South Alabama. She holds an MA in English and an MLIS from Louisiana State University. In her current position, she oversees the library’s information literacy instruction program, the library’s assessment and outreach initiatives, and serves as the liaison librarian to all the Humanities and Arts majors. Her research interests include assessment, instructional design, digital humanities and, of course, Open Education. Currently, she is working to expand the use of OER and build a culture of open at her institution.
Beth’s capstone project, Knowing is Half the Battle: A Librarian OER Needs Assessment, focused on creating a needs assessment project to provide insights into the needs of academic librarians regarding OER, their attitudes to OER, and, finally, how we teach librarians about OER and Open Education. Her hope is that this needs assessment will influence the curriculum that the Open Community uses to teach information professionals about OER. The community resources of her capstone include a data collection instrument (survey), the raw data, and 10 Key Takeaways. They are created under a CC-BY-SA license so feel free to rock the five R’s. While there are limits to this study, this small needs assessment is an attempt to begin the conversation about identifying the needs of librarians working in the OER space. Please feel free to use or modify her data collection instrument and data in unique ways to continue to explore this conversation.
